Dusting off the light sabre

Dust off the light sabre (let's be serious - it doesn't get dusty while video taping yourself fighting in the garage all the time) because it's Fan Expo Canada 2008. Well it was this past weekend. Don't go to the Metro Convention Centre now, all the figurines have been purchased.

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To be fair, Fan Expo wasn't only about buying some special edition doll, or bendable poseable action figure, depending on how sensitive you are to terminology. The 270,000 sq ft space was filled with five genres obsessed over by nerds: comic books, science fiction, horror, anime and gaming.

For the autograph collector, actors doomed to be forever referred to as their sci fi characters signed just about anything you placed in front of them. Need that ceramic Voyager collector plate signed by Captain Janeway? - you got it.

Some other notables at the show: Data, Admiral Adama, Fonzie (aka the Fonz), Buffy (the Kristy Swanson one), Boba Fett (from Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) and a whole pile of others.

Most impressive, though, was the number of people in costumes (See the photo gallery below). To someone like me, who doesn't know every possible reference to video games or comics, a lot of people just look like furries.

I learned the term cos player which basically means someone who dresses up like a character from something they're obsessed with, like Final Fantasy, Star Wars, etc, and act out a scene.

These fans then compete in an evening masquerade where their original productions are judged. So, something like a Sailor Moon operetta is entirely possible, in fact, highly probable.